I wasn’t looking for anything that night.
My daughter was asleep. The house was quiet. I was lying in bed scrolling through my phone the way tired moms do when they’re too exhausted to do anything meaningful but not quite ready to sleep.
Most of the videos blurred together. Then one stopped me.
Less than a minute in, I was crying. Not from sadness. From recognition. For the first time since becoming a mother, someone was describing exactly what I had been living through. And they had a word for it.
Matrescence.
Before that moment, I thought something was wrong with me.
I loved my daughter deeply, completely. But at the same time I felt disconnected from myself. My body felt unfamiliar. My priorities had shifted in ways I hadn’t expected. The things that once felt important no longer did, and the things that now mattered most were things I’d never thought about before.
I remember wondering, quietly, in the moments between diaper changes and feedings and trying to make it through another day: who am I now?
I felt grateful to be a mother. I also felt disoriented. And I couldn’t understand why nobody had warned me about that part.
It turns out there was a reason nobody warned me. What I was experiencing wasn’t a personal failure. It wasn’t weakness. It was something that happens to every woman who becomes a mother, and it has a name.
Matrescence is the transition a woman moves through when she becomes a mother. The simplest way I can explain it: just as adolescence is the transition from child to adult, matrescence is the transition from woman to mother. And like adolescence, it changes everything. Your body, your relationships, your priorities, your sense of who you are.
What struck me most was realizing that matrescence explains something so many mothers carry quietly and alone. You can love your child completely and still grieve parts of your old life. You can feel grateful and overwhelmed in the same breath. Confident one day and completely lost the next. These things are not opposites. They exist together. In fact, for most of us, they do.
One of the hardest parts of early motherhood is that everyone prepares you for the baby. Almost nobody prepares you for what happens to you. They cover feeding, sleeping, milestones. But very few people say: you are about to change too. Not just your schedule. You, at the core of yourself.
When I finally heard the word matrescence, nothing in my life changed immediately. The laundry still needed folding. My daughter still woke up at night. I still had days when I felt exhausted and unsure of myself.
But something important shifted in how I saw myself.
I stopped seeing myself as a problem to solve and started seeing myself as someone moving through a transition. And those are two very different things. Because when you think you’re broken, you try to fix yourself. When you understand you’re changing, you learn how to care for yourself.
I stopped seeing myself as a problem to solve. I started seeing myself as someone moving through a transition. And those are two very different things.
That shift is a big part of why Daily Ginhawa matters to me. Not as another plan or program to follow. But as a gentler way to move through matrescence. Small acts of alaga that remind you who you are while you are becoming someone new. Something to return to on the days when the transition feels heavier than usual.
So if you are reading this feeling lost, overwhelmed, or strangely unlike yourself, I want you to know something.
You are not failing. You are not behind. You are not broken.
You may simply be in the middle of matrescence. The space between who you were and who you are becoming. And that space, as uncomfortable as it feels, is not empty. It is full of growth you cannot always see yet.
You are not lost. You are in the middle of something real. And you are right on time.
With love,
Kristen
Start Your Daily GinhawaThe Ginhawa Starter is a free guide that helps you take one healthy habit and shape it into a small ritual, something that fits your real day and is gentle enough to actually stay.
If you’re craving a little more ginhawa in your everyday, this is a gentle place to begin.
Free. Less than 5 minutes to read.